Subscribe | UPI Odd Newsletter Subscribe Today is Wednesday, June 19, the 170th day of 2002 with 195 to follow. The moon is waxing, moving toward its full phase. Advertisement The morning stars are Mercury, Uranus and Neptune. The evening stars are Venus, Jupiter and Mars. Those born on this date are under the sign of Gemini. They include James VI of Scotland, later James I of England, in 1566; French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal in 1623; the Duchess of Windsor, born Bessie Wallis Warfield, in 1896; Moe Howard, one of the "Three Stooges," in 1897; bandleader Guy Lombardo in 1902; baseball player Lou Gehrig in 1903; former Sen. Alan Cranston, D-Calif., in 1914; film critic Pauline Kael in 1919 (age 83); actresses Nancy Marchand in 1928 and Gena Rowlands in 1936 (age 66); actor Malcolm McDowell in 1943 (age 59); author Salman Rushdie in 1947 (age 55); actress Phylicia Rashad in 1948 (age 54); singer Ann Wilson of Heart in 1951 (age 51); actress Kathleen Turner in 1954 (age 48); and singer Paula Abdul in 1962 (age 40). Advertisement On this date in history: In A.D. 325, the early Christian church opened the general council of Nicaea, which settled on rules for computing the date of Easter. In 1787, the U.S. Constitutional Convention voted to strike down the Articles of Confederation and form a new government. In 1846, two amateur baseball teams played under new rules at Hoboken, N.J., planting the first seeds of organized baseball. The New York Nine beat the Knickerbockers, 23-1. In 1867, the first running of the Belmont Stakes took place at Jerome Park, N.Y. In 1943, World War II's Battle of the Philippine Sea began, as Japan tried unsuccessfully to prevent further Allied advancement in the South Pacific. In 1953, convicted spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed. In 1987, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the 1981 Louisiana law that required schools to teach the creationist theory of human origin espoused by fundamentalist Christians. In 1991, the U.N. Security Council unanimously approved a plan to prohibit the export of military supplies to Iraq. In 1992, Curtis Sliwa, founder of the Guardian Angels youth anti-crime patrols, was shot and wounded by two men who laid in wait in a taxi near his Manhattan home. Advertisement In 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that prayers led by students at public high school football games are not permitted under the constitutional separation of church and state. A thought for the day: Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote of cheerfulness, "the more it is spent, the more of it remains."
